The Tiny USB Flash Drive You’ve Been Waiting For

Tiny USB flash drives like this Sandisk Ultra Fit SDCZ43 are nothing new – in fact Sandisk, in particular, has been making them for years now. What IS new is that they’re finally usably fast. Faster, in fact, than a hard drive.

Way back in 2012, Sandisk released the Cruzer Fit line of tiny USB thumb drives, and I can remember jumping at them as a storage solution to augment our poor, capacity-challenged Macbook Airs, but alas, they were so abysmally slow that they were good only for small, seldom accessed files.

It’s taken three years, but Sandisk has finally made the “tiny thumb drive” a useful means of adding semi-permanent storage to constrained devices like Macbook Airs and Macbook Pro Retinas. We tested the 128GB version on a Macbook Pro Retina and saw consistently speedy performance in a variety of tasks. The Blackmagic disk benchmark showed about 74MB/s write speeds – about the same as a standard, 5400rpm laptop hard drive, and 132MB/s read speeds – about the same as a fast desktop drive, as you can see above.

The one disappointment about this great new drive is that it does protrude from the USB port about 1/3rd of an inch (1cm), so it is not really a flush fit, for those of you hoping to leave it in as permanent storage. It’s short enough to fit in most neoprene sleeves, and the curved edge does a good job of preventing snags, but it clearly won’t work for those with extremely well-fitted cases. The Sandisk is also about the same price as the excellent Transcend Jetdrive Lite, which is a bit slower, but fits flush and doesn’t cost you a USB port, so we would definitely recommend getting the Transcend first, if you haven’t already.